Digital Diary of Ben Schwartz

Most of the people who read this already know, but last night I sang with the Chorallaries in the finals of the International Championship of Collegiate Acappella. It was a great show, worthy of the performance space in Lincoln Center. We didn’t win one of the three ranked spots, but Prathima, from our group, won best soloist, making her officially the best soloist in the world.

I drove back today, stopping off at my house to grab my tuxedo for senior ball. Now I have to get down to work and try to clear some of the assignments that have been piling up.

Tonight will be my first performance at Lincoln Center. Tomorrow is the ICCA finals.

I am focused.

Every student-run house at MIT has a Resident Advisor, whose job, more or less, is to keep students safe and happy. I just became an officially approved RA candidate, which means that I am eligible to be the RA of an MIT house. There are about a dozen houses looking for RAs this year, and if I’m lucky some of them will like my bio enough to interview me and see if they like me.

It should be fun.

I did badly; everyone else did worse.

Next time I’m bringing my calculator.

My newfound study tactic is less than effective. It didn’t help that I didn’t have my calculator, and the test pretty much required it. It also didn’t help that I really just don’t understand transistors. All of the diagrams make absolutely no sense to me. I have no intuitive picture of how they work.

I implemented RSA last night, at 3:30 AM, in about 8 lines of code. I was very proud of myself. I have no idea if I implemented it right, but I can hope.

I have a new approach to studying for a test: clearing my mind. I’ve been folding laundry that was sitting in the dryer, mailing off overdue forms, responding to long-ignored e-mails, and paying my rent.

This may not prove to be more effective than actually studying the material.

The brownie at dinner tonight was so hard that, during my failed attempt to chip some off of the baking pan, my hand slipped and I scraped my knuckle on the brownie. I think it’s still bleeding a little.

That has to be some kind of record for hard food. It’s really too bad, because the crumbs that I managed to worry off were very tasty.

ADDENDUM: My housemates arrived at an ingenious solution to removing the brownie from the pan: they dropped it off the roof. It feel about 60 feet onto the sidewalk below. This approach proved highly effective, and there is now a bowl of brownie chips in the kitchen. They’re delicious.

I’ve long prided myself on good spelling, despite a few typos on this page, so I was a bit embarassed to discover that I’ve misspelling a major term in MRI physics for a long long time. The proper spelling is “Larmor frequency”. I’ve been spelling it “Larmour”.

It must’ve been all that time in England.

I am the least productive person ever. In the midst of a huge time crunch, I wasted the day trying to set up a Ipsec/L2TP VPN between my laptop and my phone. It didn’t work, although I am now well-versed in the technology.

On the plus side, I got VNC working on my phone. That means I can have a full graphical connection to my home computer from anywhere with a wireless network. Pretty cool.